


Being a Responsible Friend

by mariamegale



Series: Call me 'sweetheart', please? [11]
Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001)
Genre: Heartbreak, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, M/M, Pining, Platonic Relationships, because that's always a fun first tag isn't it, bill is going to walk over coals for Babe and that's a fact
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:55:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27724474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mariamegale/pseuds/mariamegale
Summary: “I feel so fucking stupid,” Babe breathes out, shivering from tears and the cold and the knowledge of just how badly he’s fucked everything up. “I can’t believe how fucking stupid I’ve been, Bill, I can’t believe I— That I thought— What the fuck was I thinking?”“You’re not stupid,” Bill tells him softly, which is unusual by itself. Bill doesn’t exactly do softness, doesn't do sitting down on a cold porch to hold Babe around the shoulders and tell him everything is going to be okay, but yet here they are. “You’re not dumber than anyone else that’s been in love and made some mistakes, that’s all. You haven’t done anything wrong.”See, here’s the part that Babe doesn’t know: What’s currently going through Bill’s head is mostly tired worry over this whole situation.Because he hadn’t called Spina, Spina had called him, upset and panicking because apparently Eugene had started crying in the hospital cafeteria that day.
Relationships: Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe, Bill Guarnere/Frances Peca Guarnere, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: Call me 'sweetheart', please? [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1722178
Comments: 21
Kudos: 44





	Being a Responsible Friend

**Author's Note:**

> hhhhhhhhhhhh here we go. Content warnings in the end, see ya there <3
> 
> Thanks, as always, to the fucking incredible Laura (Anthrobrat) who gets me through literally every writing hurdle I have. I owe you so much and I'm so grateful and honoured to have you as a friend and as support. <3

Babe isn’t sure what he’s doing. He just wants to get this over with. The month of November has officially been one of the worst ones in his life so far, and he’s very close to just giving up and going into hibernation for the remainder of the year.

His life has become a mess. It’s all gone out the fucking window, and it happened so quickly he doesn’t know how to explain it.

If he tried, it would probably go something like this: Eugene had dumped his ass (and broke his heart, but Gene doesn’t know that), and Babe then spent the next two weeks unintentionally making everything awkward as fuck. He hadn’t meant to, but he managed to accomplish an aura of bad vibes so strong it had all but chased Gene out of the apartment, and then Babe himself had split without so much as explaining anything to Eugene.

Huh. Well. Turns out Babe does know how to explain it. Which, yea, he knew; The issue wasn’t ever really understanding what was going on, it was how the fuck to handle his guilt over Eugene’s feelings about the whole thing. Here’s the truth behind that.

After the whole… “Let’s not do this anymore” conversation (and Babe running out of the flat like his ass was on fire and he was trying to outrun the flames) Eugene had started behaving… Strangely around him. Being curt and quiet, in between stiff smiles that Babe knew were supposed to be reassuring, but in reality just made the tense emotion in the air so thick you could probably cut it with a knife if you tried.

Not that Babe blamed the man, don’t get him wrong. Gene had gone from having a roommate who was up for doing literally anything with him, all the time, to Babe staying in his room and pretty much only coming out for work, food, or for whatever arbitrary excuse he could come up with to get out of the apartment.

He hadn’t meant to make Eugene feel awkward, he really hadn’t. He just… Couldn’t really stand being in the same room as him anymore. Because every time he lay eyes on Eugene, Babe felt like he was choking. It was hard enough to beat back the sheer muscle memory of instinctively reaching out for him, Babe also had to fight the feelings of heartache so deep it actually made him nauseous sometimes.

So, hiding in his room anytime Gene was home it was.

In response to Babe suddenly acting like one of them had the plague, Gene had done what he always does when he faces even the slightest bit of personal problems; picked up so many shifts at work that Babe was surprised no one there got sick of seeing his name on the roster.

It hadn’t been immediate, which only made Babe feel even worse. Eugene was behaving like this was just how things had naturally played out — holiday season was coming up, and apparently the hospital needed people more than ever.

Slowly, the calendar they keep on the inside of their front door got filled up with more and more little “ _E: Work_ ” notes, until Babe realised that Gene had booked himself up on almost every moment that Babe was off his own shifts. It was like he was actively trying to either work himself to death, or just wanted to avoid Babe that badly.

Made him feel like shit, that did, because his whole goal had been to not let Eugene feel awkward. The goal had been to both try and show Eugene that he didn’t mind them being close even without the sex, like a normal person, while also making sure they did stay far enough apart that Babe wouldn’t be overcome with just how fucking badly he wanted them to not be apart.

Instead, he’d managed to chase Gene out of his own apartment.

Babe realised it about a week and a half before Thanksgiving, after getting a notification from their group chat. It had been George, texting everyone asking when and where they should all meet up for Thanksgiving drinks. Just as Babe sent an _“I’m with family all weekend, sorry!”_ Eugene equally as fast texted that he had a shift that evening and couldn’t make it.

Except that Thanksgiving night was the one night Gene actually had off that whole week. Babe had assumed it was reserved for his friends, because holidays are important to him, and having his family on the other side of the country means that meeting his friends is as important to Gene as air. And, well. Realising Eugene would rather lie to his friends about having to work than risk having to spend a moment of the weekend in the same room as Babe, was the last drop. He couldn’t deal with this anymore.

For weeks, he’d been hiding in his room, curled around a pillow and watching movies with headphones, volume set way too high to try and drown out any reminder that Eugene was there. Babe has actually contemplated getting a mini-freezer for his room to keep his ice cream cold, because he couldn’t very well let Gene know he was going through almost a pint a day, meaning he had to sit in his room and try to out-eat the physics of ice cream melting before it made a mess.

(On numerous occasions, he’d also had to try and keep his crying into said ice cream quiet so Gene wouldn’t hear him, which was so pathetic he always ended up crying more just for the hell of it, angry at himself.)

It didn’t really work, and most days he just ended up nauseous and covered in ice cream. But what the fuck else was there to do? He couldn’t very well explain it to Eugene, that was the whole point, but he couldn’t fucking talk to anyone else about it either.

Bella knew, because he couldn’t not have told her after pulling the first “call me now” emergency card in years, but she was the only one. There was just no way Babe could let anyone else in on what was happening without eventually spilling the whole story, and he can’t— He just can’t.

He doesn’t have the right to do that to Eugene. Especially considering the reactions their various friends would have — Bill would probably make it his mission to beat Gene to a pulp, while David and George would go the more subtle way for trying to ignore Gene out of their friend group and vagueposting on Instagram, because both of them are assholes like that.

Or alternatively, and more likely, they’d all just get angry at Babe for hiding this from them, because you’re supposed to share this shit with your friends, aren’t you? 

He hadn’t meant to keep it a secret, it had just kinda… Happened that way. They were just fooling around, and it was fun, and he hadn’t felt the need to tell anyone else about it. And then the months passed, and it felt weird to tell anyone about what was at that point an unofficial secret between them. And then Babe had fallen in love. And Gene hadn’t. And suddenly it wasn’t so easy anymore, no longer just a thing he could drop into conversation as a fun surprise.

He didn't have the right to tell Gene's secrets, on top of it. Eugene didn't want anyone to know he was fucking Babe (and God, who would) so Babe wasn't gonna fucking out him just because he'd messed himself up over it.

So he hadn’t told anyone. Nine months, he told no one, and that had landed him in the position of lying to his friends for close to a year and then suddenly needing them more than ever because of his own lies. Meaning he has made his own bed, here, and that’s that.

But this also meant Babe had nowhere to fucking go. Not for as long as he was still a wreck, at least. Until he managed to get a grip on his own feelings, he was going to have to avoid all of his friends, lest he has a breakdown and they all find out what’s been going on.

With Bella living in a very cramped studio apartment with her boyfriend, it wasn’t as if he was able to go there any extended periods of time, either. Heartbreak or not, that just wasn’t a cool thing for a big brother to do.

So, getting sick off of ice cream and movies and crying in his room, it was gonna have to be, accompanied by a heavy dose of self-admonishing for getting himself into this fucking situation to start with.

_Stupid_ , he’d tell himself as he struggled to get comfortable in his too-cold sheets and too-big bed, _stupid, stupid, stupid, what the fuck did you think was going to happen? When have you ever in your fucking life been able to do anything casually? How the fuck was this going to be different, Edward, just because you already knew him and thought he was great and lovely and kind and patient—_

It mostly led to more crying. Silent, of course, angry tears under the sheets, nobody to blame but himself.

And then Eugene had begun picking up shifts like he was hoping to die on one of them, and all but cancelled his own Thanksgiving, and Babe couldn’t deal with it anymore. Waiting until Gene left for the hospital (again), Babe did the only thing a lost child knows to; he called his mother.

“Please, ma,” he’d begged her while frantically shoving clothes into the only reasonably-sized bag he owned. “I really don’t wanna talk about it, can I just stay with you over Thanksgiving? And maybe Christmas, too? No, everything is okay, I just miss you, I miss…”

He’d trailed off, looking down at a T-shirt that was definitely not his. Wondering if it would still smell like Eugene, Babe had swallowed and clenched the fabric before forcing himself to snap out of it before he did something stupid. 

Something like pressing Eugene’s shirt to his face and huffing it like some kind of lunatic, while on the phone with his mother. 

“Ma.” His voice felt broken to his own ears, and God only knows what she was hearing. “Please. I just— Can I—“

“Oh, Babe, of course,” his mother had said, sounding worried in that way only mothers can. “You’re always welcome here, you know that, you don’t need to ask. Your father should be done at work soon, I’ll send him over to pick you up.”

“No, ma, it’s okay, I’ve already ordered an Uber, don’t worry about it.” Babe had stuffed the shirt in his bag, hastily finishing his packing by just throwing in whatever shit he saw that might be smart to take with him, barely stopping by their door to leave Gene a message before he left.

‘ _Home for thanksgiving,_ ’ he wrote on their calendar while assuring his mother that Uber wasn’t dangerous, he was 24, he knew how to take care of himself, _please don’t send dad over_. 

The fact that even curling up on the passenger seat of his father’s car felt like giving them too much information was all the warning flags he needed to know that going home was a spectacularly bad idea, but what the fuck else was he going to do?

Not coming up with an answer to that, Babe hesitated with the pen in the air, before tacking on a ‘ _don’t call._ ’ to the end of his shitty message.

He was out the door five seconds later, not caring about anything but going somewhere far away.

———

The next couple of weeks are… Weird. They’re weird.

Babe shows up at his parents house to a warm, if worried, welcome. Just as with Eugene, he doesn’t blame them. It’s probably been about three years since he so much as spent the night at their place, and even then they had to spend two weeks nagging him for that to happen.

Look, he loves his parents, he really does. There’s a reason he still goes over for dinner every now and then, when Bella’s gonna be there too. He loves them. But spending more than a few hours with them in one stretch is… Exhausting. It’s exhausting, and ever since moving out he’s much more preferred to go home to sleep and come back the next morning if so be. He hasn’t even spent the night before Christmas Day there, and their Christmas Eves regularly draw out into the early hours of the morning, courtesy of two bickering brothers and one bickering sister.

So. In between work and helping his ma prepare for Thanksgiving, the first three days of his impromptu visit are spent gently, and unsuccessfully, trying to convince his parents that everything is fine.

Which wouldn’t be so bad, if his mother hadn’t gotten convinced that the issue was a love spat between Babe and the non-existent girl she’s convinced he’s been seeing; Granted, he hasn’t explicitly told her that he doesn’t have a girlfriend, but it had been from the pointless hope that the words _“ma, I’m gay,”_ would one day actually mean something to her.

It’s not until he admits that him and Gene got into a fight, and that Babe is trying to give the man some space, that they let up immediately. His father looks like he just bit into something unpleasant, which Babe doesn’t have in him to acknowledge, while his ma just goes on to completely switch the subject for a few awkward minutes.

Although her second instinct, once that is over, is to immediately tell Babe to invite Eugene over so that they can make up, which is equally as unhelpful.

For the first time in his life, he finds himself agreeing with his dad’s sentiment that they maybe don’t have to invite every sad stray they find on the street for their family holidays, even though a big part of him also wants to scream that Gene isn’t a fucking stray and not to talk about him like that.

So, tally goes: Three days in, and he’s almost gotten into a shouting match with his dad. 

Lovely.

Things don’t get easier once his friends find out where the fuck he is. 

Which, yeah, Babe knew they were eventually going to, but at the same time he had just kind of… pushed that fact to the edge of his mind. Just like a baby, in fact, as if that would stop reality from catching up to him.

The effect: He’s been ignoring people for weeks, now. Not a great way to treat his friends, Babe knows this, but he just— Can’t. He doesn’t know how the fuck to look Bill in the eye and explain that _yeah, sorry, I’ve been holding this huge secret in for nine months now and no, I didn’t have a real plan for when I was gonna let you guys know_. _And yeah, it ended up with me being crushed to smithereens and I still haven’t let you know something was up, and now I don’t know how to get out of this hole I’ve dug myself._

Thinking about it makes him want to cry. And that’s why he’s doing this, isn’t it? Shutting himself off and pretending like nothing happened and fucking running away to his parents’ place, because he’s too much of a coward to face the consequences of his own idiocy, just classic Heffron. 

Standing in his parents’ kitchen over the sink, Babe is really trying to stop thinking about how he’s just about in the middle of ruining every meaningful relationship he’s ever had and instead start to think about this fucking pan that won’t get fucking clean. He’s so busy with that, he doesn’t think when the doorbell rings.

It’s not until his ma happily exclaims, “Bill! Oh, it’s so good to see you, it’s been too long! Babe is in the kitchen, bless his patience, he’s been such a—“

Whatever compliment his ma gives him next, Babe doesn’t really hear it, because his heartbeat has picked up to about deadly levels. Bill’s talking to her in the hallway, but Babe isn’t listening, trying to force himself to keep scrubbing at this fucking spot until… Until… He doesn’t know, until it magically makes the lump in his throat go away, or something.

Someone is walking into the kitchen behind him. Bill is walking into the kitchen behind him. Babe is not going to cry. He isn’t. He doesn’t even know why he would be crying, nothing has fucking happened, but he can feel his face start to flush in that splotchy way he’s always hated and the fucking pan won’t—

“So, you live with your parents now?” Bill says calmly, and Babe gives up on the dishes. Bill doesn’t sound angry, doesn’t sound affronted, but he’s not not sounding like any of those things, either. Fifteen years of friendship, and Babe still can’t interpret him. “Jesus Christ, Doc really did a number on ya, didn’t he?”

That gets Babe to look up, because what the fuck. Bill is leaned against the kitchen table, arms crossed, looking so thoroughly unimpressed that Babe almost wants to turn his face away like a dog that just got caught chewing on the furniture.

“Bill,” he chokes out, and then doesn’t follow it up with anything. He’s not sure if he wants it to be a warning, or a plea, or just a nothing nonsense word that just happens to resemble Bill’s name a whole lot.

There’s a part of him screaming, because Bill doesn’t look smug at the fact that Babe just all but confirmed that this is about Eugene, meaning that he actually did fucking know already. Babe’s head is spinning. Did Gene tell him? Or who— When— What—?

Bill pushes himself off of the table, walking toward Babe’s parent’s kitchen door with a nod. “C’mon, let’s talk outside. Not gonna make you do this in the Heffron fucking kitchen.”

“Thanks,” Babe mutters, feeling a bit dazed, following Bill outside to the tiny little back porch. There are some chairs there, a little outdoors sofa with pillows and a blanket on it, because his mother is nothing if not an expert when it comes to home decoration and making everything feel cozy and homey all the time. 

He doesn’t sit down. It doesn’t feel right, the cozy atmosphere and homey mood not something he feels like he should be indulging in right now.

Bill doesn’t sit either, instead leaning against the little porch fence as he pulls his cigarettes out, handing one to Babe. His parents don’t like when they smoke out here, but seeing as how Babe’s head feels like it’s full of screeching squirrels right now, he thinks he’ll gladly take whatever punishment this is gonna get him.

Jesus Christ, he’s twenty-four and worried about his parents punishing him for sneaking a cigarette on the back porch. No fucking wonder his life is a steaming garbage mess right now, he’s not adult enough for any of this shit. 

Maybe he should just move back in with his parents for the long term, start going to church on Sundays and not stay out past eight PM on school nights. Yeah, that sounds about on par with his emotional maturity right now. 

_Act like a child, get treated like a child_ , Babe thinks. He doesn’t like how much the voice sounds like Eugene. Bill is still looking at him with that cool expression, eyebrows raised as he lights first his own cigarette, and then Babe’s for him. Babe doesn’t want to know what the fuck he’s thinking, so of course the next thing he does is to ask about it.

“What do you want, Bill?” He asks quietly. Bill takes a very slow drag of his cigarette, not looking away from Babe for a moment.

“I wanna know what the fuck you’re thinking, Babe,” he says, smoke and his body heat making the words come out in visible puffs of air slowly drifting away from them. Bill always loved doing that gross thing when he smokes, where he doesn’t exhale properly before speaking, making him look like he’s powered off the cigarette smoke. Babe has never understood it, but now he’s happy to have something to watch instead of Bill’s cold face.

“Bill, I didn’t mean—“

“Oh, so you moved back in with your folks on, what, accident? Is that it?” Bill is snapping at him, and Babe doesn’t know what to say in response. He doesn’t know what this is, he doesn’t know what Bill wants, he doesn’t— He just doesn’t know, but that’s not exactly fucking news, is it? “Babe, what the fuck?”

“Will you fucking stop it?” Babe shouts at him, feeling raw and tired and frustrated. “I get that you’re fucking pissed at me, but since fucking when do you do this? Play games? Just tell me what the fuck you want to tell me, that you’re angry and betrayed and you think I’m a fucking idiot who got stuck up on—“

“I don’t think you’re a fucking idiot,” Bill throws back, and at least this is familiar. Babe knows how to yell, and he knows how to handle a yelling Bill. “I’m just pretty fucking pissed that you let shit go this fucking far without telling me, though, because I thought we were fucking friends!”

“Oh yeah, because what I’m doing here is absolutely a fucking insult towards you,” Babe spits, gesturing wildly with both his hands in a way he hasn’t done for a very, very long time. “Whole fucking world revolves around you, doesn’t it? Because I clearly can’t be trusted to think or act on my own, no, always fuck everything up when I do, so it must mean that I fucking—“

“You telling me eight months went by and you never once fucking thought—“

“But you sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong, now that’s absolutely fine!”

“I fucking care about you, Babe! I wanna make sure you don’t—“

“Well, it’s too late for that, isn’t it? I already fucked up, already got myself into—“

“For fuck’s sake, Babe, this guy chews you up and spits you back out and you’re angry at me for being fucking worried?” Bill is throwing his hands up, actually shouting now, and Babe feels like someone popped a hole in him. He moves his eyes from Bill’s angry face to his feet, smoking with a shaking hand that he can only partially blame on the cold. “We’re losing our fucking minds out here! You keep this secret for close to a year, then you go off the grid, and then I gotta find out from fucking Spina that you moved back in with your parents?”

“I haven’t moved back in with them,” Babe says, a little bit quieter, because he hasn’t. “It’s just… Just for Thanksgiving, and maybe Christmas, because…”

“What? You didn’t wanna be in his fucking hair?” Bill says, annoyed, and Babe wants to curl in on himself. “He breaks your heart, and then he has the guts to make you feel like you were in the fucking way?”

“That’s not what happened,” Babe tells him, the shiver in his hand moving through his whole body. It could be the cold this time, could be the fact that he feels angry and sad and humiliated, so fucking stupid he doesn’t deserve to even be here right now. 

Bill throws his hands out again, his cigarette all but forgotten while Babe takes a very measured drag of the one he has between his fingers. “Then what the fuck did happen, Babe? You wanna tell me that, or am I gonna have to continue to Nancy Drew the truth out?”

“You’d make a terrible Nancy Drew,” Babe mumbles around his cigarette, but Bill doesn’t move a single muscle in laughter. Babe sighs. “How did you even find out, Bill?”

“You two aren’t as fucking subtle as you think you are,” Bill tells him flatly. “Now give me one fucking reason why I shouldn’t go over there and beat this asshole’s face to a fucking pulp.”

“He didn’t do anything,” Babe insists tiredly, rubbing a hand over his face. “He just didn’t wanna do this anymore, and he has the right to, he was— He was fucking kind about it, or whatever the fuck you say, Bill. I just… Couldn’t handle it, and that’s my fault, so I’m the one who—“

“Well, maybe he should have been a bit more fucking considerate, then,” Bill spits at him, angrily lighting another cigarette after ditching the butt of his old one in the ashtray.

Because yeah, his ma still keeps an ashtray out here, because she’s not an idiot and Babe is a terrible son.

“Maybe,” Bill says sardonically, taking an angry drag, “he should have fucking thought about how you’d fucking feel about all of this.”

“Bill, he’s not a mind reader,” Babe sighs. “How the fuck was he supposed to know?”

“You don’t have to be a fucking mind reader to notice this shit, Babe.” The longer this conversation goes on, the worse Babe feels about it, as if all the energy is being sucked out of him bit by bit. He doesn’t know what Bill’s point is, he doesn’t know what to make of any of this, he doesn’t understand the purpose of being angry or indignantly going over who did what.

What’s the point? He’s lost Eugene anyway, if he ever even had him, and he’s never getting him back. Babe has ruined the whole thing, the sex and the friendship and his whole living situation, because he couldn’t keep his fucking wits about him and not behave like an idiot.

“I don’t care,” he says quietly, sitting down on the freezing little bench his ma has put out on the porch. The pillows are stiff from the cold, as is the blanket Babe’s unfolding to pull around himself. “What’s the point, Bill? You can be as angry as you want, but it’s happened anyway, I fucked it up and it’s over and no matter what we do it’s gonna be the fucking same. You wanna punch someone’s face in? Punch me, because I’m… I don’t know. I don’t know, Bill, I just wanna fucking forget this whole thing.”

Bill is looking at Babe like he’s in pain, and Babe refuses to meet his eyes. That face doesn’t belong on Bill, doesn’t belong on anyone, but hurting people is just what he fucking does now, isn’t it? He gets the cold blanket wrapped around him. It doesn’t make him feel better, seems to just make him shiver more, and he wants to cry.

“I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” Babe says quietly, looking down at the floor in front of him. “What’s the point, Bill? I just walk around and accomplish nothing and make people feel uncomfortable and angry and annoyed and I—“

“Hey, no, stop that,” Bill tells him, sitting down next to him on the small bench, pulling him close. “See, this is why we’re fucking worried, Babe. You drop off the map and don’t tell any of us what’s going on, you don’t wanna meet up, and then I have to find out from one of Eugene’s fucking friends that you’re apparently living with your parents now?”

“Why are you even talking to Spina?” Babe mutters, telling himself, again, that he isn’t gonna start crying just because he feels bad for himself. Bill sighs.

“Because you’re not answering your phone, not with anything that’s actually true, and I wasn’t gonna call Eugene.” It’s as good of an explanation that Babe is apparently gonna get, although he wonders if that means that Gene told Spina that Babe had left. “And then I find you sitting here thinking all this shit about yourself, and… We’re worried about you, Babe. The others don’t know what’s going on, or not as far as I have any idea anyway, they have no idea what happened. Luz wanted to break into your apartment when you ditched out on Thanksgiving, did you know?”

“No,” Babe says quietly, because he didn’t. He got so stuck in his own emotional hell that he hadn’t really considered how his friends might feel about the whole thing, beyond using it as a way to punish himself, and now he feels bad about it. He burrows a bit deeper into his blanket. It feels like it’s starting to warm up a little.

“Well, he did. And I think Joe would’ve helped him,” Bill tells him, rubbing a hand over Babe’s arm. “Look, I love ya, but you can’t just keep hiding from all of this, you know? That’s not gonna work.”

“What am I supposed to do, though?” Babe asks him, and it’s like his last bit of restraint loses its hold. The lump in his throat hurts, his eyes are burning, and he barely holds a sob back when he continues. “I don’t know what to do, Bill, I’m so fucking gone over him, I can’t be in the same room as he is without… But I don’t wanna make him feel like… Because he really didn’t do anything wrong. I know you want that to be the case, but it’s not his fault that I got in over my head and now—“

“I know, kid, I know,” Bill tells him helplessly as Babe has to break off on a sob. He holds Babe a little tighter as he presses his head onto Bill’s shoulder, crying what feels like three weeks’ worth of lonely tears all at once. “’s gonna be okay, though, you’ll get through this. We’re gonna get you through this, okay?”

“I feel so fucking stupid,” Babe breathes out, shivering from tears and the cold and the knowledge of just how badly he’s fucked everything up. “I can’t believe how fucking stupid I’ve been, Bill, I can’t believe I— That I thought— What the fuck was I thinking?”

“You’re not stupid,” Bill tells him softly, which is unusual by itself. Bill doesn’t exactly do softness. “You’re not dumber than anyone else that’s been in love and made some mistakes, that’s all. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

Babe stops talking, and just cries for a while instead, curled up against his best friend on his ma’s tiny little porch sofa. It’s two days before Thanksgiving, and he doesn’t know how to get himself out of this hole of misery that he’s in.

He doesn’t know what to do. So he curls up against his friend who’s holding him with such uncharacteristic gentleness, crying with his breath coming out in little puffs of steamy air in the cold.

See, here’s the part that Babe doesn’t know: What’s currently going through Bill’s head is mostly tired worry over this whole situation.

Because he hadn’t called Spina, Spina had called him, upset and panicking because apparently Eugene had started crying in the hospital cafeteria that day.

Ralph had sat down in front of Eugene, the man looking like a ghost of himself, decided enough was enough and asked Gene point blank what the fuck happened between him and Babe. And Gene had cracked, telling him that Babe had left for his parents without even saying anything, just leaving a note that he didn’t want to hear from him, and that he doesn’t know how everything got to this point.

Getting Gene off the last half of his shift, Ralph had dragged him home to put him into bed and make him something to eat, and he’d called Bill under the guise of a smoke break to ask if he knew Babe had left their apartment. 

Which Bill of course hadn’t, and Spina had been pretty shocked to hear that Bill didn’t even know the two had parted ways, which had apparently been a situation for Spina end Eugene all on it’s own.

“Motherfucker,” Bill had screamed down the phone, “I’m gonna fucking kill him! And I’m gonna kill you, why the fuck haven’t you told me? I fucking knew something was up, I fucking knew that asshole had done something like this—“

It hadn’t been horribly constructive, Bill wishing he still lived in the age of actual telephones so that he could’ve slammed the phone down as a way to end the call. Instead, he’d had to make do with a very angry button press, and then left for the Heffron residence.

But that isn’t what Bill is thinking about right now. Because he’s not as much angry at Eugene anymore as he’s annoyed at the whole situation, and he’s thinking about the last text that Ralph sent him; “ _Go talk to him, and be angry if it helps, but Bill, I think they’re both missing each other too much for this to be sane.”_

Because as much as he wants this to be a one-and-done situation where Eugene Roe is an inconsiderate asshole that Bill can take Toye and go beat up, that’s not what’s happening here, is it?

What’s happening, Bill is starting to realise, is that Babe and Eugene are both idiots. Idiots who assume too fucking much and talk too fucking little, because Bill has never even heard a story in which Gene cried, but now he’s crying at his fucking workplace because Babe left him? And Babe’s crying on the back porch of his parents’ house because Gene broke up with him?

_Jesus fucking Christ._

No, Bill isn’t gonna think anything else about is, because this thing is a fucking mess and he’s just had to accept that his best friend is a fucking egghead of massive proportions. Give him a break. 

Okay, so maybe ‘egghead’ isn’t the kindest thing to think about a man currently shivering so much Bill wonders if he’s gonna turn into an icicle, but look him in the eye and tell him Babe doesn’t deserve it, yeah? No? Exactly.

“Come on,” he mumbles, getting up from Mrs. Heffron’s little outdoors pillow nest and pulling Babe with him, “let’s get you inside before you fucking freeze your ass off.”

Babe goes without fuss, lets his mom immediately come over to berate him for going outside for so long without a jacket and put some tea on while ordering him to take a shower. They say goodbye like that, because Bill has already stayed longer than he planned to and Babe looks like he’s in trouble anyway — _fucking hell, what was he thinking, going to stay with his fucking parents_ — so it’s probably better to just leave him to it. 

“Gonna be okay, yeah?” He tells Babe before he leaves, hand on his shoulder. “I promise you, one day you’ll be able to laugh at this mess.”

Babe shrugs with one shoulder, looking tired and unhappy. It doesn’t suit him. “Thanks, Bill. Talk to you later.”

It’s not a question, so Bill doesn’t answer, just shoots him a short smile and gives his shoulder a last squeeze before he leaves, yelling goodbye to the Heffrons as he does. It feels like he’s in fucking high school again, and there isn’t a sigh in the world that’s heavy enough for this bullshit.

Working his phone out of his pocket, he scrolls to Spina’s number and hits the ‘call’ button.

Because yeah, the man is right, this whole thing is fucking insane. Bill might not know a whole fucking lot about romance, but he knows he has to somehow do something about this. Ralph picks up after a few rings, and Bill doesn’t even let him get a greeting out before cutting him off.

“What the fuck did you say happened with Eugene earlier?”

Ralph sighs very deeply down the line. “Hello, Bill, nice to hear from you too. What do you mean? That he cried in the cafeteria? I’m expecting you to keep that a fucking secret, by the—“

“Of course I’m not gonna tell anyone, you insane?” Bill snaps down the phone, struggling to get a cigarette out and lighting it with one hand. “But yeah, I mean that. Why was he crying for?”

The silence on the other end for the line might make a lesser man uncomfortable, but Bill is a big man capable of big things, meaning he only takes this as a golden opportunity to use both his hand for this cigarette lighting business.

“Bill, what is this about?” Spina eventually asks, and now it’s Bill’s turn to sigh around a mouthful of smoke, breathing it out impatiently before he responds. Just to let Ralph know that this nagging isn’t appreciated.

“This is about Babe looking like he got fucking shot in the chest the second I mentioned Gene’s name,” is what he ends up saying, hopefully sounding as annoyed as he fucking is. “Because Eugene broke his fucking heart, ya got that? Now, normally, my response to that would be to get some people together and go over there and bust his kneecaps—“

“You know,” Ralph says dryly down the other end of the phone, “you sometimes threaten people with that as if you’re a big mob shot, but not once have I seen you actually break someone’s kneecaps, Bill.”

“Shut the fuck up, will ya?” Bill tells him, equally as annoyed as before but now with the addition of frowning at the street in front of him. There’s an old lady giving him an angry eye over her shoulder, but fuck old ladies, sticking their noses into other people’s business like they have any place being there. “Point is, I could go over there and fuck the guy up like he deserves, but you’ve sorta given me the idea that maybe he doesn’t deserve to take a long walk down a short pier, you know?”

Spina is quiet for so long Bill almost thinks he’s lost him, but then there’s the sound of a lighter flickering on the other end and next moment, Ralph is taking a deep breath. Bill takes a sympathetic drag of his cigarette in response, glaring back at the old lady when he walks past her. She shakes her head and looks away, and Bill feels smug over yet another triumph. Bill, 27, Old Ladies, 0.

“You wanna know what the fuck’s been going on with Gene?” Ralph’s voice is very level, and Bill somehow gets the feeling that this is what he’s like when he’s talking to his patients. 

“Yeah, please,” Bill says, intending to say a whole lot more but getting interrupted.

“What’s been going on is that he’s been looking like a fucking dead person lately, Bill,” Ralph tells him in one, ranting go. “He works so much I swear to god I’ve gone in, worked a shift, gone home and slept and when I got back, he was still fucking there. As far as I know he sleeps in the fucking hospital, because he’s always. Fucking. There.”

Bill doesn’t say anything, still scowling at the general city of Philadelphia as he takes another drag of his cigarette and listens to Ralph talk. “He doesn’t eat, I swear to God, we could get the whole hospital in trouble if the union finds out, because he keeps working through his lunch breaks. There’s a conspiracy between me and the nurses to force him to have a fucking sandwich if he’s been standing up for more than seven hours straight. He’s lost so much fucking weight in just a few weeks, I don’t even know if you’d recognise him if you saw him.”

“Ralph, isn’t that just fucking Eugene, though?” Bill tries, because to be fair, none of this is actually… News. Gene works too much, the sun is bright and the pavement is grey, what about it? 

“Bill, this isn’t fucking usual,” Ralph hisses down the phone, and Bill is effectively silenced. “People who don’t know him are getting worried. The surgeons are getting worried, Bill, and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a medical drama, but they are correct in that all the surgeons are fucking insane.”

Ralph goes on, and Bill feels like he should maybe try to curb this rant, because he hadn’t exactly signed up for quite this fucking much information at once. But the man is on a roll, and so Bill lights another cigarette — Frannie is gonna kill him when he comes home smelling like an ashtray and a half, but she’s just going to have to live with that right now.

It’s generally more of the same, and overall Bill can’t say he doesn’t understand where Spina’s coming from, because… Yeah, wow. It sounds like this has been coming for a while, weeks worth of stress and worry built up as Eugene has, apparently, _“closed himself off so much you’d be lucky to get a ‘hello’ when you show up in the morning.”_

He’s reminded of how it’s felt to see Babe pull back from them all, and the heavy feeling in his chest that they have to fucking do something about this. Especially when Ralph goes off on how—

“He’s been looking so much happier lately, too, Bill.” It sounds like the man has sat down at some point, his voice tired. It’s easy to imagine him with his head in his free hand, cigarette burned down to the filter without having been ashed since the halfway mark. “These last few months, he’s been looking so goddamned happy. Been smiling more, feeling so much more relaxed, fighting with our supervisors to get him time off so that he can— Fuck, Bill, he’s been like a whole different person, in the best way possible.”

Bill clears his throat for a second. “He was fighting to get time off for what, Doc?”

“What do you think? To be able to spend more time with Babe,” Ralph sighs. Bill didn’t expect anything differently, but he also isn’t sure what to do now that he’s gotten it spelled out for him. “Sundays, evenings, at least every other Thursday because they apparently have had a standing dinner date on Thursdays for the past five months.”

Thinking back on Babe’s behaviour this year, the sinking feeling increases as Bill realises that Ralph is correct, again, and he never fucking noticed. 

Because yeah, him and Babe haven’t met up on a Thursday for a long fucking while, and he’s known for ages that Sundays are weird family dinner cooking nights in the Heffron/Roe household. They’re all not technically uninvited to join, but anytime any of them do, there’s the feeling in the air like neither Gene nor Babe really want them there. Like they want those days for themselves.

“Tried to get time off to see Babe, huh?” Is what he ends up saying, quiet and a little bit uncomfortable. Ralph hums down the line, and now it’s Bill’s turn to put a hand over his face and groan. “Fucking hell, Spina, they’re so fucking stupid.”

It makes Ralph laugh like he’s surprised, which Bill takes as a compliment, because the only way he ever gets people to laugh is accidentally anyway. “Yeah, Bill, I think that’s the diagnosis.”

“Babe’s been looking at him like he hung the fucking moon for years—“

“Yeah, I’ve become aware.”

“They’ve been fucking since February, and neither of them fucking noticed any of this shit?”

“I don’t think they were looking at it like that. You know, Gene called me on the brink of a panic attack the night they stopped, because he thought he’d abused Babe and his trust for months.” That gets Bill to be quiet for a little while, because, as Spina snorts, “come on, Bill, you were thinking that too. Or were you gonna bust his kneecaps out of love?”

“I didn’t think—“

“That it was that way around, I know, but can the thought fucking occur to you now? Eugene thinks he’s a fucking creep who’s been taking advantage of Babe. Not because Babe is in love with him, but because Eugene’s—“

“Hey hey hey, who the fuck is saying Babe’s in love with Eugene?” Bill snaps, annoyed that Ralph would make the assumption — an assumption that Bill has made, too, sure. But Bill has been Babe’s best friend since they were kids. He gets to make those assumptions.

“You gonna tell me Heffron’s not in love with him?” Ralph asks flatly, making Bill frown even harder.

“Fuck you, is what I’m gonna tell you,” he spits, increasingly annoyed when Ralph sighs at him again. “You don’t get to fucking tell him what he’s feeling, even if you think you got all the fucking evidence in the world, you got that? Babe is the one who decides what the fuck he’s feeling, and what that is ain’t none of your fucking business. Understood?”

Spina is quiet for a while, and Bill refuses to back down his own silence, waiting until Ralph tells him a little “yeah, I got it, don’t worry.”

Bill butts out and tosses his cigarette in a passing trashcan, sighing deeply. “Good. Now what the fuck are we gonna do about this?”

“Get the two of them to actually talk would be the best thing, wouldn’t it?” Spina sighs, continuing with the first thing that came to Bill’s mind as well; “But there’s no way we’re gonna get them to do that.”

“Then what the fuck do we do?”

“Calm down, Billiam.” Not even giving him enough time to respond to that, Spina continues. “Honestly, looking at him, I think Eugene would break after all of five seconds if the two of them are pushed into the same room as each other. Maybe we don’t gotta do anything else than that?”

“Maybe,” Bill mutters, rubbing a hand over his face. “Look, pal, I don’t know if I got the energy to think about this much longer right now before my common sense fucking melts and runs out of my ear. Can we talk about this after Thanksgiving? Babe’s fucking committed anyway, there’s no way he’s doing anything but being babied by his parents for the next couple of days.”

“Well, that sounds—“

“Yeah, it ain’t,” Bill interrupts him before Spina can say ‘nice’. “They treat him like an actual fucking kid, Ralph, and if you ask me to go into the details as of why they do that I’mma have to go punch an old lady in the face.”

“Uh, okay,” Spina says slowly, “Bill, I don’t… I don’t know what to do with that.”

“It doesn’t matter. Look, I’ll call you in a couple of days, see if we can sort this out?”

“Sounds good. Please don’t punch—”

And with that, they hang up, Bill stashing his phone away in his pocket angrily. Why angrily? Because his default state is one of anger, that’s why, and if he’s not angry he’s usually laughing, and this doesn’t really feel like a laughing matter. Yet.

“God, I can’t wait for this to be fucking funny,” Bill mutters to himself, turning the corner towards his house tiredly.

All he wants is to just… Get this mess sorted out, let Babe go back to living a normal life, let Bill go back to being the jerk best friend who takes the piss out of him in every way he can think of, Babe laughing and rolling his eyes but infallibly by his side.

He doesn’t do well with having to be the grown up mess-sorter. He will be, because Babe fucking needs him to be, but that doesn’t mean he’s not gonna laugh when this mess fucks off on its own.

**Author's Note:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS:
> 
> \- Nobody knows how to fucking communicate.
> 
> \- Lying to your friends? I guess?
> 
> \- Some REAL bad eating habits re: eugene, born out of general misery and stress, but it's... It's really not good. Not gone into huge details about, if this is sensitive to you, it's contained to the paragraph that starts with  
>  "Bill doesn’t say anything, still scowling at the general city of Philadelphia as he takes another drag of his cigarette and listens to Ralph talk."
> 
> \- I think that's it, but please lemme know if I missed something! <3
> 
> \---
> 
> FUCK we're getting so close to the end, i cannot believe it. Thanks to all of you who are here, reading and kudos'ing and commenting, i love you all so so much. <3
> 
> [I have a tumblr,](mariamegale.tumblr.com) like hanging out with  [a bunch of lovely people on our BoB Discord,](https://discord.gg/JZVc2Jk)  
>  and if anyone wants to come say hi it always warms my heart to the max. It'll be fun, I promise, we can talk nonsense and headcanons (and kink, even though my writing has been LACKING in that regard lately lmao) See ya soon for the end <3 


End file.
